


out of the dark day, into the brighter night

by York



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dreaming, M/M, Pre-Slash, TDT-era, an abundance of paper cranes, st. agnes sleepovers, the first sleepover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-03 22:23:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14006100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/York/pseuds/York
Summary: "Blink and you'll miss it. I'm not doing this shit all night, so when itdoeshappen, don't be fucking daydreaming and gripe about it later like some —""I won't miss it," Adam promised."It's not a circus act.""Ronan. I won't miss it."





	out of the dark day, into the brighter night

**Author's Note:**

> this probably has way more subconscious pining than how it would actually go down but in this lawless land no one can stop me.
> 
> title is from [Dream State](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjjlABP5t1Q) by Son Lux.

"Blink and you'll miss it. I'm not doing this shit all night, so when it _does_ happen, don't be fucking daydreaming and gripe about it later like some —"

"I won't miss it," Adam promised.

"It's not a circus act."

" _Ronan_. I won't miss it."

That was the hope. That was the plan.

Adam would not let himself. There was no way he was going to be focusing anywhere else, not after asking Ronan to demonstrate his dreaming, interrogatively — not when the dreamt toy plane was still a bright afterimage on his cornea, the battery-less and engine-less miracle scything through the summer sky, aloft through magic alone.

It could still be a trick of Ronan's design, still be some kind of artfully crafted lie, a fanciful hand-wave of unreality Adam still had no origin point for.

 _If you could_ , Adam had said to him. _If you can, show me. I want to see it happen._

Without seeing, he had trouble believing.

Ronan had turned on him, shoulders squared and brought alive and with the challenge. His grin was a bull scraping its hoof against the ground, and he asked, _When?_

In the dim light of the Henrietta evening, Ronan now stood rigid in the center of Adam's apartment on the second story of St. Agnes, his figure a dark coil bent slightly to avoid the sloped ceiling. He looked anywhere but Adam, taking stock of every meager object in the room: a dumpy never-refurbished desk, the Goodwill lamp with a cracked filament, several makeshift plastic bins passing for surfaces. The thin mattress was the most expensive possession in the room, though totaling everything, the title was a low favor.

Adam's face burned at the bare examination, but his pride chimed, _it's mine, it's my nothing, it's mine_.

Ronan pulled so hard on his leather bracelets the skin of his wrist turned white. He nudged a pile of secondhand books with his shoe. The stack shivered. He said, "No guarantees. And don't freak the fuck out, either. I'll be... I can't move right after, not for a minute or two."

"What?" Adam asked. "Can you be woken up?"

"Do _not_ throw a fucking glass of water on my face. It's like paralysis, or an," he waved his hand, "out of body... whatever. I can't feel anything anyway. I'll come to eventually, just don't freak the fuck out, okay?"

Adam said, "Okay," and looked around the room. "Do you, uh, need space? You can take the bed."

Ronan gave him a look as if that would be the most miraculous thing to happen here today.

"Oh, give it a rest, I'm not even using it."

Ronan's look intensified, like he was contemplating the floor instead, but he sat his ass down on the edge of the mattress, then almost shoved back off. " _God_ , this thing is tissue paper. Is it even stuffed? What did you pack it with, gravel, maybe?"

This was the same person that had punched Adam's father on his behalf, he reminded himself. The same person that mourned Noah, the same person that translated Latin for them in Cabeswater, Gansey's best friend, his own maybe-friend. "Lynch," he said, taming his voice to be bored, and leveled him with his eyes.

"Fine. Just chill for a while, or do some summer reading or whatever it is you do for fun."

Adam was doubly wearied by this. "How long is this going to take?"

Ronan fluffed the miserable pillow behind his head. "It's falling sleeping, Parrish. That part's normal."

"I meant until you wake up."

"Beats me."

Triply wearied, Adam sighed.

He dropped his chin on his forearms, arms crossed over the back of his desk chair, and slouched deeply. It could all be for nothing, he thought, or it could be for something extraordinary. He found himself more strongly believing in the second option, his trust in Ronan a few ticks above what it had been months ago.

A few months ago, Ronan wouldn't have trusted him with this, either. He wouldn't have admitted _I can't always bring something back_ while he was laying down the basics of his dreaming. Adam, cautious but ever curious, had replied, _And when you can?_

Ronan countered with another warning: _I can't always choose what to bring back_.

There was something left unsaid in his admission, but there was always something Ronan wasn't saying when he was talking. He held out words like they were the truth but the shadow of his hands covered the real honesty of the thing. Adam suspected that accidental dreams and bad dreams were different beasts, no matter how hard Ronan tried to make them sound the same.

For a minute, a safe minute, when Ronan was still rustling with the process of falling unconscious, Adam closed his eyes. It was an odd and noisy thing, his apartment. He heard everything about his newfound resting place: engines groaning outside, dogs whining and their dogtags clanging against their leash, the church creaking on its foundations, unsettled and ancient and restless.

He wished the world could be quiet, just for this single minute.

He wished for so much more than a minute.

When the minute was over, and the noise had begun to lull into an attuned and cancellable static, a cold wind caught the back of his neck.

Adam's spine straightened. He opened his eyes.

His window was closed, the door was shut — there was no wind. Reflexively, Adam's hand scratched at his hairline but found nothing out of the ordinary. Still, he'd surely felt it — a backwards brush of air, wrapping a wisp of intent around his skin.

 _Cabeswater_ , Adam thought. Then, again, with more uncertainty, the name pitching into a question.

In the past month there had been more oddities, more unexplainable swaths of imagery grasping at him at the most mundane moments. Ever since he'd thrown himself into the ritual circle, ever since he'd said those words — _hands, eyes, yours yours yours_ — he'd stared a little more intently at his reflection in the mornings. Wrung his hands together with more pressure. Slept a little less soundly. He had already been sleeping unsoundly, for as long as he'd been at Aglionby, but the reminder of what he'd done in the forest kept his senses running in place.

Sometimes, it felt like striking at a bug sucking at skin and drawing a hand away to find nothing there. Adam was not marked in any way. His head, concussed from the inside, his hearing, imbalanced and half-there, and his bargain, echoed in his mind but branded nowhere else.

Adam liked seeing things. Clearly, unobstructedly seeing things. The invisibility of whatever had taken to haunting him was as unwelcome as whatever Ronan's nightmares were to him.

His eyes flicked to the bed. Ronan was very still, and very asleep. Frown lines relaxed, chest subtly cresting and troughing with his breathing. He looked less like an asshole when he was sleeping, Adam thought. A younger, gentler, more thoughtful Ronan. It was a little hard for Adam to look at.

Wind ghosted past his ear again, and he was distracted. It itched, phantom, a foreign language Adam wasn't fluent in, something he didn't understand but wanted badly to learn.

More time had passed in his room than he was aware of — time got away from him in jumpy gaps these days — and it was within this in-between, this spaced-out reckoning of where the impressions were coming from, that Adam felt it.

Before he even saw it, he felt it coming.

Distantly, as a scream carried on wind across a field, a pitched whine crowded Adam's deaf ear, pressing on his drum, until it became a rhythm of words. Nonsensical, beating, communicating something poorly and Adam cupped a hand to it, not in pain, but in an instinct to silence it. Whispers, pleas, solicitations — all accompanied by a loss of balance, the floor becoming the ceiling, his stomach dropping and his head floating above the roof of the church. He was being pulled by the feeling, then let go, let go, released from it, a cutting silence, brief and serene —

And then he saw it, after he felt it coming.

The bed and Ronan were unchanged, unmoving, just the same as they had always been in the previous moments. Then it was as if this timeline had jumped tracks, reality decided these rules were boring and wanted new ones, physics went on a bender and allowed the unthinkable to happen in its absence: dream to reality. Nothing was there, and then it was.

Birds exploded over Adam's miniature apartment bed.

Adam fell out of his chair.

 _Don't freak the fuck out_ , rang Ronan's words in his head, yet he was soundly freaking the fuck out.

They were _moving_ — "Holy _shit_ ," Adam breathed, hand clutching his shirt above his stammering heart — but he saw that they weren't _birds_ , exactly. They were angular in recognizable geometric shapes: hooked necks, pointed beaks, unnaturally isosceles wings. More than anything, against the dull sheets, they were oddly colorful in patterns that stood out like gashes on smooth skin.

As his vision focused, Adam realized what they were: cranes. Folded from origami paper. On his goddamned bed.

There must have been a dozen of them, all flapping their wings lightly, lifting into the air about a foot before dropping back down onto the bedspread. They inched outward into their surroundings to feel it out like newborns, curious and childish, exploring what they could.

Adam's pulse thudded in his ears. He counted the seconds — _ten_ , and four of them crowded by Ronan's ankles. _Twenty_ , one pecked Ronan's cheek and could have given him a papercut but left no mark. _Thirty_ , one fell off the mattress and onto the floor.

He didn't move, and for two minutes, the room shuffled with the sound of a gentle printing press, hissing paper and irregular breathing from Adam's own lungs.

One of these moments was spared to wonder if Ronan made them himself: Were his dreams molded from clay, as gods chose to form their creations? Or did he simply breathe life into them, already in existence by other hands?

Ronan's hand twitched, and one of the cranes, startled, flapped away from it. He sat up.

"Shit," he said, half-vehemently, half-groggy. " _Shit,_ " and the vehemence took full force. Ronan looked around the room, assessing. "Do you have — a bag or something?"

Adam's mind wanted him to say something, but his mouth hung parted and soundless. In the corner, where he'd stacked miscellaneous supplies, Adam had tucked a ball of plastic grocery bags for garbage. His mind imagined himself going to grab a spare, but his body didn't follow these instructions, either — he couldn't pry his eyes away from staring after one of the birds flopping across the floor.

Where Adam was still, action became Ronan — he was already ripping the pillowcase off of Adam's pillow. He rounded up the nearest couple of cranes inside of it. They squirmed inside the fabric, popping and prodding at the casing, but Ronan's grip around the end of it was tight.

"No you don't," Ronan said, and lunged after one that was trying to squeeze under the door.

Adam picked himself up from the floor, finally. "Are those — Lynch, are those _alive_ , please tell me —"

"You could help," Ronan said, stuffing his catch into the pillowcase, and turned about for any more runners.

"Answer me. What are they? _Damn_ , what did you do? How —" _is this possible?_

He snapped, " _Help me_ , asshole," and it cut into Adam angrily, and it welled up inside of his bones, and then Adam blinked and suddenly he was pinching an unmoving crane by its neck in the air, the pads of his fingers white with pressure. He had snatched it from beside his foot.

It was impeccably folded from what he could tell. He'd never made a paper crane, nor held one before, but it seemed elegant enough to him.

Ronan eyed him expectantly, arm outstretched with the trembling pillowcase. Adam tugged a small opening into existence and stuffed the bird inside, and it made a rambunctious commotion when it joined the rest of the party.

Without conversation, they collected the rest. Ronan pointed at one pushing a hardcover book open, _that one_ , and Adam gently took it before it could become another page. Another tried crawling up Ronan's pant leg, _there_ — and Ronan shook it out and scowled at it, then dropped it into the pillowcase.

One by one, gruffly and efficiently, they gathered up the flock of dreams. Adam noted, studiously, the markings on each of them, all vibrantly different in their own way: one was printed with a pirate's skull and crossbones; one was just the logo for Sports Illustrated, printed over and over again; one was lined with sheet music, a complex string of music notes dancing across the bars like flapping feathers. Another particularly large crane had a disturbing pattern, covered in bloody spatters of gore and what looked to be massacred squashes —

Oh, Adam got it.

They were almost all accounted for — the last one left in the room was still trying to fly. Its wings flickered weakly.

Ronan held out a hand to it, palm up. The crane attempted flight again, admirably almost-hovering, and it landed in the crook of Ronan's hand when it came down. It went still when Ronan curled his thumb over it. His nose turned up at its embarrassing floral pattern, all flowers in unimaginable colors.

Adam sat next to him on the bed, not taking his eyes off the blues and maroons and electric shades of the petals that made up the pattern. Ronan shifted, sitting on the pillowcase, closing off the edge of the bunched-up opening and freeing his other hand so he could cup them both around the bird. His small, impossible dream thing quirked its head up at him, and he exhaled.

"Shit," Ronan said again. "They weren't supposed to do that."

Adam felt his heartbeat in his neck. "What were they supposed to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. They were supposed to do fuckall."

"You really can..." Adam looked at him, then over at the pillowcase, quaintly twitching and discordant and alive, like it held inside hummingbirds. "This really came from your head."

Ronan ran a finger down the crane's spine. "Hurts that you doubted it."

"Skepticism isn't doubt." _It can also be hope._ "Did you make them?"

" _Make_ them?" Ronan asked, briefly looking at him and away. "I don't know how to make them. They made themselves."

"That doesn't make sense." Adam shook his head once. "And you wonder why they came out like this."

"One, shove your sass," Ronan said, "and two, it _does_ make sense. It's a dream. Don't you have dreams where all kinds of weird shit make sense?"

It was doubtful, or some kind of impossible-seeming hope, that Adam dreamt of the same things Ronan did. He just shrugged.

The air felt charged, like Ronan had pulled some dream oxygen out along with the birds and Adam was breathing it in. There was some distance between where they sat, but Adam leaned in slightly to get a better look at Ronan's hands.

Ronan's shoulders seemed to hunch more stiffly. "The fuck am I going to do with you," he muttered at his dream.

A thought came to Adam unbidden, and it bit him, all impulse and practicality. He imagined a lighter or a match would solve things.

But he buried the suggestion, because he looked at how small and comfortable the crane looked in Ronan's palms — he saw how it must be the runt, and Adam couldn't bear judging it destroyable.

Instead, he said, "They're not all going to be living here in my pillowcase, or anywhere else in my room."

"What, you _don't_ want to keep a murder of paper micro-birds up in here? They'll crap from your rafters, right onto your face when you're sleeping."

Adam's mouth quirked. "Sounds like you're speaking from experience. You're the bird crap expert with your raven menace."

The pillowcase jumped, pried into different directions, restless. Ronan laid a hand over it, his other hand still a cradle for the crane, and the movement quieted some.

Adam eyed it across Ronan's lap, and said, "What are you going to do with them?"

After warring with a thought, Ronan leaned back. "I'll take them," he said, alleviating some knot of worry inside Adam. "I'll —" Then he smiled, wicked and fast. "I'll take them to the Barns."

"You're not allowed," Adam told him plainly.

Ronan sneered, "Okay, _Gansey_ ," but he sounded only half-serious, like this conversation had been trotted out too often, either out loud or in Ronan's head, for it to actually get to him. Or maybe he had just gotten good at masking what it did to him. Either way, it wasn't a good look on his half-shadowed face.

Adam went on, "You could keep them in Gansey's sock drawer."

"Fuck," Ronan said, surprised. "Remind me to get your input on senior pranks next year."

"Sure," Adam agreed. And then staring at the origami bird wasn't enough anymore, and he held out a tentative hand, pointing a little. "Can I —"

That was all the prompting it took. Ronan tipped the bird into Adam's hand, and briefly, their fingers brushed to bridge the gentle transaction — then it was settled into Adam's curved palm, content as ever. Carefully, Ronan watched for Adam's reaction to all of this, but Adam schooled his expression, even as the bird preened in delight from the attention.

He ran a finger down its back, just like Ronan had, and it settled down. "About nine hundred and ninety more of these and you get a favor from the gods, or something."

Ronan stretched out his legs. "Yeah, no Glendower needed, just gotta dream the second coming of Birdemic."

"What else have you dreamt?" asked Adam, fighting with a smile. "Things that are alive, like this."

Ronan had his wrist to his mouth, like he was going to chew on his leather bracelets, but just scratched the stubble on his jaw. "Some other animals, real ones, with fur. This buck —" he paused, and dropped his hand. "It came out albino, antlers all knotted. Weird fucker. It lives at the Barns."

"How many?"

"Lost count."

Processing this was a skipping record trying to catch its needle, Adam's mind spinning, making sense out of everything. "I can't feel a heartbeat. It's like it's humming with something else. Do they... are they alive? Do they have biology?" He needed something about this to make sense.

"I'm not going to cut one open to find out," Ronan grit.

Paper wings flapped in protest, or agreement, or itchiness. Adam eyed the crane, then eyed Ronan.

Ronan jutted up an eyebrow. "Dissect it if you want, Frankenstein."

For a beating moment, Adam was impressed that Ronan knew it was the scientist's name, and not the monster's. The way he'd said it, though, blurred the difference.

Adam shook his head. "No," he said, and he held the fluttery, flowery, fanciful crane as it twisted its paper neck to scan the room, or scan Adam's face, or scan nothing, because _fuck_ , it didn't even have eyes. "This is..."

"A little monster?"

"A miracle. Maybe."

Ronan looked at him, _maybe_ , and Adam noticed it, _maybe_ , and then the crane hopped out of Adam's hand and fell on its face between their two knees. Ronan plucked it by a wing and set it on his own leg.

"Chainsaw would hunt you for sport," he told it, almost sweetly, as if it was a conceivable option only because Ronan would never allow it to come to pass. Thus, the idea was entertainable — a growing ruffled raven, its feathers not yet sleek, hopping after a distressed dream thing.

No, Adam could not imagine Ronan enabling that. And then Adam wondered _why_ it was impossible to imagine, and he wondered _when_ he had acknowledged that Ronan gave a shit about other living things, even things as vaguely alive as a dream.

He wasn't sure. It had happened without him noticing. Here was the evidence, right in front of him: hands a safety net around a dream, protective and careful and unexpectedly loose, where Ronan's fists usually clenched to hurl at his brother, or a wall, or a locker at Aglionby. It was a different kind of sight. _Ronan_ was different.

The dim light in the room grew fuzzier around the edges.

"I should —" Ronan nodded to the bagged flock. "You know."

Adam blinked at it. "I guess you're taking my pillowcase."

"Oh, boo hoo. You'll get it back. I can't promise there won't be any paper droppings inside, though."

"Gross," Adam said pleasantly, and then Ronan was standing to go, scooping the crane up to his chest and his other hand once again making a tight fist around the pillowcase's edge. Boots were shoved into, laces left untied, Ronan looking exclusively at the floor and the moment felt like it was slipping away from the both of them when Adam found he couldn't _not_ ask. "Wait —"

He'd risen alongside Ronan, and linked a finger in Ronan's elbow to stop him. Instinctually, to pull him back, like buying into the rules of a dream to make it last longer so it didn't fall apart when you second-guessed it.

At Ronan's wide-eyed look, as if Adam's hand was an alien monstrosity, Adam quickly withdrew. Jumpy from the evening's events, maybe, but Adam didn't blame him either way.

He asked, "What are you doing tomorrow?"

Ronan's gaze flicked up from Adam's hand to his face. His voice came out tempered and odd, like this was a leading trick question. "Giving you back your pillowcase."

"I meant —"

Adam looked at the white sack of dreams in Ronan's grasp. It was quieter, adapting to the adventure of moving when they had been restless sitting still. Then there was the floral, whimsical child of a thing in Ronan's hand, and Adam had only held it for just a short minute, but he wasn't ready for his room to be achingly, emptily lonely again. Its weight was the press of a q-tip in his hand, the breeze of Cabeswater, real and alive. Or as real as the idea of it could be stretched.

He pointed to Ronan's chest, to the crane he held against it. "Can I keep that one?"

Unfurling his hand, Ronan glanced down at it. The little creature stared back up at him.

Adam said, "Just to look at for a while, I guess, and you could take it back tomorrow. Eventually they should stay together. Birds of a feather, or however you say it."

"Flock together," Ronan said.

"Yeah."

He hesitated. "If I come back here and it's pinned to the floorboards or something —"

"Shut up," Adam said, a pointed finish to an eye roll.

There was something easy about the way Ronan let his shoulders down, unwound compared to when he had arrived, another piece of him unfolding. Perhaps it was the feat of bringing out a successful dream. He held out his hand, offering the crane. "Whatever, man. Just don't let it get out."

"They're a little pathetic," Adam said. "They can't fly more than a couple of feet. I think it's safe to say it wouldn't get very far."

"Fuck you, don't make fun of them," Ronan said, but he tipped the crane, wings twitching and body breathing, into Adam's waiting hand. When he took it, their hands brushed again long enough for the bird to jump across, his skin unexpectedly warm even though the bird was just cold paper —

Ronan dropped his hand. Adam cupped his other hand over the bird, and said, "Okay."

"Okay," Ronan said.

"Thanks."

Two-finger saluting with the hand not holding the pillowcase, Ronan turned to go.

It was nearly pitch dark, with only light from the street lamps edging through the uncovered window. When Ronan had arrived, outside it had been red-tinted, summer-warm, hazed and saturated with heat. Now, leaving the way he came, Ronan was taking all the air with him — fraught with eviscerated secrets, frosting the air with electricity, whispering of possibility.

The floorboards creaked under Ronan's shifting boots. He'd paused, hand on the door handle.

"Later, Parrish."

Adam nodded. "See you, Lynch."

Then he was gone, shutting the door behind him, and thudding down the stairs. It was quiet when the sound faded, and in that peace, Adam thought he had figured something out.

Staring after him, Adam let out a breath.

The crane fluttered in his cupped palms.

In his chest, something — alive, surprising, pulled from a dream — fluttered in the exact same way.

**Author's Note:**

> "but author, this isn't technically a sleepover" what did i say. lawless land. he slept and it was over at St. Agnes.
> 
> any and all thoughts delight me, share some below :)
> 
> [tumblr](http://ellipsesetcetera.tumblr.com/)


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